Cleanup after hacker attack
A large international service organization suffered a massive ransomware attack, resulting in a significant portion of the internal mission critical systems being rendered useless with more or less total disruption of the entire enterprise.
One of the destroyed systems were an Oracle based system.
Martin Berg Consult was intensively involved for some weeks and managed to salvage all commited transactions up to the disaster.
The assignment included runnning several priority 1 service requests with Oracle Support – requiring a 24×7 presense for responding to support updates.
Increasing profitability of hosted solution
Martin Berg Consult described and made recommendations for a new hosting architecture for a hosted solution being offered by a large solution and hosting provider in Denmark.
The suggested changes included both server platform and Oracle Database.
The end result was an 50% reduction of the costs incured by providing the hosted solution.
Optimization of complex SQL
I a system intended for administration of service offering to citizens a performance analysis revealed that a very significant part of the database load and user response time could be attributed to one particular database query.
This query was used to determine the relation between citizens and service personell and was was implemented with a database view containing more that 1000 lines of code.
This one database view was implementing 11 different principles for matching citizens and service personell (depending on customer) and had as a consequence of several years of stepwise maintenance gotten so complex that none of the resident developers wanted to change it.
Unfortunately no documentation had been created.
The performance problem could not be solved by adding indexes or by making simple code changes – the result being that a total rewrite was required.
This rewrite was done – among other techniques – by introducing materialized views. A full documentation and testdata to verify that the new query gave the same result as the old was created.
The optimization resulted in a 10-fold reduction of response times and a significant reduction of the database server load.
Using Oracle Enterprise Manager in a large organization
In a large goods producing company most of the internal systems has been developed in-house.
The systems are by a large fraction deployed on an full Oracle stack (Oracle Weblogic, Oracle Database and Oracle Linux).
The server and database portfolios are counted in the 1000’s.
For monitoring of all of this several tools for monitoring has been deployed – including Oracle Enterprise Manager.
Despite the efforts put down for developing and maintaining the monitoring tools, the system owners in general considered their systems to have no relevant monitoring.
The assignment was described as a staff function with the purpose of determining and documenting the gaps between the existing monitoring and the needed monitoring – one system at a time.
The assignment was not continued to completion due to expenditure control, but it was accomplished to assess several systems and to initiate improvement processes.
Over the years there has been many assignments and customers.
As a general rule the name of the customers will not be revealed – many of the assignments dealt with mission critical internal systems and it is expected that the details on these are kept confidential (in many cases this is explicitly included in the contract).
However it will still be relevant to describe some of the more interesting assignments – with “interesting” either referring to business consequences or to technical highlights.
English (UK) 
Dansk